Mind-lines: Lines For Changing Minds

This book is great. I highly recommend it if you have limiting beliefs you want to overcome. You know the idea of "glass half empty half full." You can put a spin on things to make something resourceful/positive rather than negative. Well, this book explains 26 different patterns to do just that. Do the exercises, which require a lot of deep thinking, and you'll see negative beliefs transform to something resourceful and thus empowering. As I did the exercises, I felt a shift on how I viewed some limiting beliefs; it was as if weight was lifted from my shoulders.I've heard others describe Mindlines as a tough read. There were parts where I had to read a second time around to get a full understanding. But other than that, I don't consider it tough at all. The book assumes readers are familiar with NLP. If you are unfamiliar with NLP, there will be parts in the book where you'll be like, "What the hell's he talking about?!" But you will still reap the benefits if you do the exercises. Great book! (As mentioned in another review, there are a ton of typos! Out of all the books I've read, this tops the list for the most)UPDATE, two years later January 2009 *** stars rather than *****: I do not recommend this book for deep-rooted issues. Reframing a deep-rooted issue may alleviate pain and suffering initially. But the pain/suffering will come back just like a splinter that's bound to come to the surface. I do feel, however, that reframes work well for minor issues. Another cool thing about reframes is that it shows you the numerous viewpoints and angles to look at things from. It'll train you to see things from an overall picture as opposed to a narrow view. But the thing you have to realize is that no viewpoint is right or wrong, ultimately.Reframes consists of A LOT of thought and analysis. I spent numerous hours reframing limiting beliefs. It worked for the minor issues, but never for the deep-rooted issues in my life. The thing I failed to see initially was the fact that it was thought that caused the pain and suffering in the first place. Eckhart Tolle wrote a book entitled "The Power of Now." In the book he gives the following analogy: It's like trying to catch an arsonist on the loose and the arsonist is the Chief of the fire department (paraphrased). Thought can never solve an issue fully because it is thought that is the root of the problem in the first place. Here's another quote from Krishnamurti's The First and Last Freedom: "Can thought resolve our problems? By thinking over the problem, have you resolved it? Any kind of problem-economic,social, religious-has it ever been really solved by thinking? In your daily life, the more you think about a problem, the more complex, the more irresolute, the more uncertain it becomes."If you want to overcome deep-rooted issues, you have to "see" thought for what it truly is. The "seeing" is not conceptual. It's not something you understand mentally; that's just another thought looping around and around in the head. Check out the following books if you're interested: Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, A New Earth, Michael Singer's The Untethered Soul, I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

I first heard of this book from an audio cd. Seminar leader David DeAngelo, demonstrated how to use Mind Lines to shatter limiting beliefs, and strengthen inner game, and how it worked for him.Later an nlp student asked me to install the idea from this book, EXTERNAL BEHAVIOR = INTERNAL STATE. He waxed so lyrically about Michael Hall and Mindlines, I determined to read it.Ostensibly it's about the art of reframing conversations using the 26 techniques in this book.What happens though, as you read, and apply the Mind-lines to yourself, you come up with new ones and you may notice your own mind starts to open up, you look at things in new ways, and you can find inspiring answers, and shifts in perception.Here is an example with reframes:"Your being late means you don't care." External behavior (lateness)= Internal State (don't care).Reflect back: Have you ever been late for something, and did it mean you didn't care?Counter example: If I was on time would that mean that I did care?Contrast: Just because someone is on time doesn't mean they care. Just because someone's late doesn't mean they don't care, does it?Meta Model, Chunking down: How specifically, does my being late mean I don't care?Mind Reading: How do you know I don't care? Are you able to read my mind?Authority frame: According to who? Where is it written that lateness means not caring?Value: What's more important, my being here, or my being late?Allness: What would it be like if everyone was always late? Would it mean that no one cares, ever? What kind of world would that be?You do need to have good rapport with some reframes. And there are 18 more than this. The patterns I have used most to change my own thoughts have been negation, future pacing and metaphor patterns. More recently, I am using chunking up questions.If you're like me, you'll discover yourself coming up with your own reframes for common situations, whether it be in career, personal relationships, dealing with children, or dealing with difficult or uncooperative people, and as you do you will realise the rewards of reexamining these situations. The more you open up to the opportunities these reframes present, the more opportunities open up.Hope this was useful.

The E.B. = I.S. is worth the price of the book. Learning to separate external behavior from expressed internal states makes confrontations easier to understand. The breakdown between content reframing, and context reframing helps me decide the direction of my response.It should be noted that this book is built off the backs of two other books. “Reframing” by Bandler&Grinder (1982), and “Sleight of Mouth” by Dilts (1999). You only need to read “Sleight of Mouth before this one. And even then, you don’t need to read “Sleight of Mouth”. If you read other reviews, then you will find many bashing this book for repackaging "Sleight of Mouth". The narrative that this book is a copy is erroneous. Hall improved the conept, Dilts organized it, and Bandler&Grinder discovered it. It's the next step in evolution.The worst part of this book is Hall's lack of rapport building skills. Every example in this book came off a disingenuous. Hall seemed intent on trying to be unpersuasive. You will need the ability to discern the helpful structure through the garbage examples. I had to constantly rework the frames over and over again because Hall's examples were some of the most unpersuasive nonsense someone could think of. He's unlikable, to say the least.Also, every NLP book I have read has been overly wordy. Hall is no different. So patience will be needed with this book. He does seem to genuinely know what he is talking about. It’s worth the buy, flaws and all.

In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), “Leon Festinger proposed that a person who experiences internal inconsistency is motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance, by making changes to justify the stressful behaviour. adding new parts to their cognition.” (Wiki). Harnessing this neural propensity for change-making is to a certain extent what conversational neurosemantics is all about, and follows on from an all-embracing philosophy of “counteracting the black magic of the primary sensory cinema - the associated movie-mind.”According to Denis Bridoux (once a student of Dr Hall) who has his own contribution to make in discovering a number of “overarching symmetries” to Hall’s model. There are two ways for a client to learn the linguistic structure of a problem and resource a better map - based on whether a slant is placed on the pacing or leading aspect of the ‘in-syncing’ harmonisation between the client and practitioner: ‘communication’ (pacing) exquisitely matches the client to elicit the structure of the existing cognitive dissonance with a meta-model interrogative question, e.g. the universal quantifier challenge of “always?”; or ‘rapport’ (leading) exquisitely mismatches the client to install the cognitive dissonance to generate the shift, e.g. the ‘allness frame’ challenge of “You always think everyone (even your mum) - who shows up late does not care about you!?”To the casual observer the differences between these two approaches can seem quite minimal with a lot of room for cross-over, for example where does Groveian Clean Language and Rogerian paraphrasing fit into the either/or schema? However, what the dissimilarities amount to are distinctions between the application of ‘meta-model’ questioning derived from therapeutic contexts (courtesy of Satir) and the application of ‘mind-line’ utterances in coaching scenarios.I mention a demarcator between ‘neurolinguistics’ and ‘neurosemantics’ [The two terms were originally referred to by Korzybski who introduced both phrases in his 1936 papers] because it is one the authors propagate; and they do not hold back in critiquing the classic model which sometimes comes across as abstrusely pedantic and somewhat theoretically cosmetic IMHO. For example, at one point the proposed alternative for the finer modal distinction termed in NLP a sub-modality is better thought of a meta-modality. Seriously, why?The material contained within Mind-Lines is if nothing else tenacious in driving home the power of conversational framing, and promoting a set of pedagogical props to assist the learner. These consist of a magic cube, eight mind-line movements and a set of fairly intelligible mind-maps (with contributions by Bridoux). First and foremost it is important to understand the two implicit structures or levels of meaning: involving primary associations or linkages - how content is made inside the box - i.e. ‘this external behaviour leads to or equals that internal state’; and, secondly, the embedment of frame upon frame (up framing) - how contexts are formed outside the box - i.e. ‘idea x is embedded inside of idea y’.The secret sauce to the whole shebang is that for each of the two levels - building upon Korzybski’s theory of Structural Differential, (i.e. event-object-description-inferences) - there are a number of customary ways to tackle belief systems. Inside the box - corresponding to the deductive reasoning of sensory based descriptions (the movie mind) - mind-lines redefine the ‘content’ from one frame of reference to another using chunking down, strategies, reframes of external behaviour, reframes of internal state, (self) reflexive reframing and counter-exampling (with cartesian quadrants). Outside and above the box - corresponding to the inductive reasoning of evaluative symbolic systems (inferences) - out-framing refers to shifting the ‘context’ by artfully challenging the client into considering different frames of reference.These mind-lines are ‘directionalised’ through what Hall calls “the three spells of languaging” in explaining the effects on consciousness: ‘vertical shifting down’ patterns break the spell of universality by deframing via precision and clarity; ‘horizontal shifting across’ breaks the spell of evaluation by constructing new realities and reframing old realities. The ‘vertical shifting up’ pattern of out-framing creates the spell of embedded framing or multi-layering frames upon frames, in simple meta-projections, eg “I will never amount to anything”; then the vertical shifts further upwards to a meta-meta level (state about a state) and self-fulfilling prophecies, eg. “this is the way life is going to be”; and then upwards further still to the highest ‘up-frame’ (enhancing frame of reference) that out frames all lower frames into “mis-beliefs and erroneous conclusions of self-blame”, eg. “those are the ideas you built as a little child!”In summary, Mind-Lines (2002) is a considerable evolution on Bandler and Grinder’s ‘Reframing: NLP and the Transformation of Meaning’ (1982), and owes much of its debtitude to Dilt’s ‘Sleight of Mouth: The Magic of Conversational Belief Change’ (1999). It is not an easy read by any reframing of the imagination, not because the material is difficult, but in having so many options in changing beliefs to explore! Also the scalable simplicity of the magic cube as a mnemonic device means you only ever need to go as deep as you really want to and still not loose sight of the eight belief-busting mind directions - and lest not forget there is analogous reframing too which hovers somewhere off plan in Hall’s and Bodenhamer’s model of the world. What a world to discover!

This book is 5 stars as a reference work. However you would be better off starting off with something easier to get you up and running. I would recommend Doug O'briens audio (sleight of mouth Its called), you can find it via googleThe book itself can feel like hard work as its very dense. But it is very comprehensive and makes for a good reference book once you have a basic understanding of the patterns. Also I would recommend Dilts Sleight of Mouth book.One of the best things about the book is it teaches you the importance of deframing the belief first, that makes reframing much easier, as the logical flaws become more obvious.I recommend that you start by writing down your own limiting beliefs in a word document. Create a template with all the patterns listed and a space to write out the reframe. After you have done several you will start to become skilled with the patterns and over time you can go back and edit the document as you become better. You will start to notice results both in terms of improvement in your own thinking patterns and your reframing skills. Its a really wonderful experience when you feel a paradigm shift on a negative thinking pattern that has troubled you for years.This stuff really brings NLP to life and makes it practical

An excellent companion to the work of Roberts Dilts and Sleight of Mouth. It takes it on by looking at external actions and the internal states that it creates. Takes a bit of time to read and is more of a manual of reframing however some excellent gems in here. Magic if you are prepared to put in the time. I loved the frame they put around things that are "complex". Its true that your mind opens when the frame changes. Wish we could make this easy to learn for everyone and the world and your world would change, wouldn't it? That has to be is the bigger ambition for NLP. Mind lines is a skill to master over time and worth it.

i think its complex for the average jo its looked like some university assignment of theisis but great thought processes none the less

Good book enjoying reading good tip have been play around with them and had lot of fun